How Far Has Microsoft Really Come?

28 May 2007

This evening, I decided to swap out the old Toshiba Tecra 8000 that I was letting my daughter beat on and traded it for an IBM T20. Rather than go through all the hassle of reinstalling Windows 98SE and all of the games, I decided to simply take the hard drive out of the Toshiba and put it in the T20. I knew that drivers were going to be an issue, so I had downloaded most of the issues beforehand and copied them over to this machine.

After several reboots, a lot of “click ok” etc, the Windows installation took on the IBM T20 and functions as well as it did on the old hardware. The IBM T20 is a newer laptop than the Toshiba Tecra 8000, thus having a faster processor and more RAM, so the rather “simple” games my daughter plays now play without the “stuttering” I had on the older machine.

Now if I were to do the same thing in Windows Vista, it would probably work without too much work, all except for this pesky little thing called reactivation. See, Windows Vista doesn’t like it when you take a hard drive and swap it into a new computer. Too much stuff has changed. So now instead of endless reboots, you have to do a “mother-may-I” with Microsoft on the phone. That assumes, of course, Windows Vista detects all your hardware and you don’t have to do the driver boogie for Vista too!